


Five Things Donna and Cameron Talked About in the Summer of 1994, and One Thing They Never Would

by randomizer



Category: Halt and Catch Fire
Genre: 5 Things, F/F, Misses Clause Challenge, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-08 13:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12865182
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/randomizer/pseuds/randomizer
Summary: Donna and Cameron learn to talk to one another again.





	Five Things Donna and Cameron Talked About in the Summer of 1994, and One Thing They Never Would

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RidiculousMavis](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RidiculousMavis/gifts).



After the hard part, after _I miss you, too_ , and _I’m here_ , something important shifts between them once again, this time something good and light and freeing. Yet like stroke victims who must relearn a language that once came naturally, they need to massage and shape the new thing that they are into whatever it is destined to become.

**1\. Joanie**

_June 5, 1994: coffee at Starbucks_

 

“She wants to go to Thailand.”

Cameron realizes that Donna has just said something to her. “Who? Joanie?”

Donna nods, and Cam can see that she’s biting her lip. “The college thing is definitely paused, at least for this year—she’s not going to be able to go if she didn’t apply anywhere. I sort of thought she’d just live at home and get a job, but that’s not her plan, apparently.” Donna’s voice is calm and measured, but Cam easily perceives the emotion beneath the facade.

Cam looks at Donna, wishing that they were far enough along in this process of rebuilding that she could say something comforting, something to make Donna feel less miserable about the prospect of Joanie’s going away. She settles on asking a question instead. “When does she want to go?”

“At the end of the summer. She’s still figuring it out. She’ll be eighteen by then, and all of the money that she inherited from Gordon will be out of the trust and available to her.” Cam can see how conflicted Donna is about that money, money that means that Joanie is free to go where she wants to go and do what she wants to do.

“So you’ll have all summer with her, at least. That’s good.” Summer can be everything, Cam thinks to herself.

Donna nods, taking a sip of her coffee. She can’t seem to find anything to say to that.

Cam tries again. “She’s not going to stay there forever. I think she just wants something different to clear her head. It’s going to be really great for her. She’ll see so many new things.”

Donna sighs. “I know.I know that.I’m really proud of her, actually. I never would have had enough guts to do something like that when I was eighteen, or even now that I’m forty. She’s . . . amazing.”

Cam thinks about that, wonders if she would have wanted to go halfway around the world when she was eighteen.Actually, she’s pretty sure she would have—anything that got her as far away from her mother as possible would have seemed perfect at the time.She decides not to share that particular line of thinking with Donna. “Joanie’s never been afraid of anything.Do you remember how you met Diane?”

“She beat up Jennifer, and Gordon and I had to go in for a parents meeting with her teacher.” Donna’s laugh is genuine, the sadness vanquished for the moment.Cam feels a flash of pleasure at the transformation.

“Hey, I think Diane always insisted that it was a draw.” Cameron grins, remembering that first pitch to Diane’s VC firm to get seed money for Mutiny Exchange, several lifetimes ago.

“Cameron . . .” Donna hesitates, and Cam instinctively knows that they’re about to shift into something serious, something about their past. She braces herself, praying that she’ll react in the right way to whatever might be coming.

“Thank you . . . thank you for keeping in touch with Joanie all this time. It meant so much to her.She really loves you.” Donna is staring into her mug, flushing a little. “It meant a lot to me too, that you would do that, even when . . .”

Cam relaxes a little; of all the things that Donna might have been about to bring up, this one is easy. “I . . . Joanie’s great.That year that I lived with you and Gordon, when the girls were kids, it was just . . .” Cam’s voice suddenly cracks, and she has to look away from Donna.Maybe not so easy, after all.

Cam glances back in time to see a flash of surprise on Donna's face, as if she'd had no idea that Cam cared so much about that time from their shared past. And then she notices something else, something that might have been tenderness, or might have been something else entirely. “You’ve been Joanie’s hero ever since she first met you, when she was six years old. I’m pretty sure that she gets her fearlessness from you; it sure didn’t come from me or from Gordon. I love that about both of you.” Donna’s voice is offhand, as though that last sentence is no big deal to her.

Cam absorbs it, wondering what Donna would say if she ever saw one of Cam’s panic attacks. She thinks about how she runs away when things are getting difficult, or even if things are going too well. “I’m not all that fearless these days. I never really was, actually.”

Donna looks at her, and Cam suddenly feels completely exposed, as though Donna is seeing through her and coming out on the other side.But then they both smile at each other, enjoying the moment for what it is.

 

**2\. Pilgrim**

_June 17, 1994: taking a break from a video game_

 

“Did you have to make that third puzzle on Pilgrim’s second level _that_ hard?” Donna is looking at Cam, shaking her head in mock exasperation. “It took me half the night to get through it.”

Cam grins back at her. “You have to respect the player.”

Donna rolls her eyes. “I could live with a little less of that respect.” Donna stops smiling suddenly as _No, I actually couldn’t_ floats over her head like a thought bubble in a comic strip.

Cam is still talking. “I spent more than two years developing that game. I wanted everything about it to be perfect. It was supposed to be a game that you lived, not a game that you just played. Jesus, that sounds so pretentious, doesn't it? But I wanted it to . . . well, I wanted it to inhabit people’s souls.” Cam’s voice suddenly drops, abashed, and Donna can see exactly how important the whole thing was to her.

Donna hesitates for a second, then plunges forward. “It . . . it did that for me. I was going through kind of a thing, and playing that game helped get me past it. It was just . . . it was beautiful. Infuriating, sometimes, but always beautiful.” Donna finds that she can’t say anything more than this, remembering how she felt the first time she tried to play Pilgrim, after the hospital, after she had told Cam to stay out of her business and her life. After she had realized, too late, that Cam had only fixed the algorithm to help Bos, not to destroy Donna. Donna had wanted to reach out to Cam for the first time in years, and Pilgrim was her only means of doing so.

Cam is quiet for a moment. “I was going through a thing too, when I wrote it. I didn’t know it then, but I think I used it to figure everything out, to give myself a happy ending.”

Donna thinks about that ending, how the Pilgrim-child got to go home to the warmth of a parent’s love. “That last image of the game was great. It was so unexpected; the Pilgrim seemed so . . . so invincible throughout the game, much stronger than any player ever could be.”

Cam nods. “Yeah, that ending kind of surprised me, too.I wasn’t sure where it came from.”

Donna looks at Cam, fighting off what seems like a ridiculous desire to hug her tightly. “It was the best game I’ve ever played. It was . . . it was art.” Cameron is an artist, Donna thinks to herself suddenly. She's an artist, and her medium is code. Why had she never thought of her that way before? 

Cameron shakes her head, looking a little lost. “I guess I was really making it for you all that time, even though I didn’t know it. That kind of makes sense, because I was thinking about you while I was doing it.” Donna watches Cam pretending not to notice the fact that Donna's eyes are becoming suspiciously shiny. “But you can’t make a game for one person,” she continues.“I wish it had been a little more accessible. I actually can’t blame Atari for shelving it, even though seeing a re-coded version of it out there someday is going to kill me.”

“It could have been more accessible.Just a couple of tweaks, and it might have . . .” Donna stops, shaking her head at herself. “Sorry. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to change any of it, not really.”

Cam gives her a half-smile. “Well, if you had been around when it wasn’t already too late, who knows what would have happened? Maybe I would actually have listened to you this time. Maybe more than one person in the universe would have wanted to stick with it.”

Donna smiles back. “But who would want that, right?”

 

**3\. The Hospital**

_June 29, 1994: sitting by Donna’s swimming pool after a barbeque_

 

“Why did you say you couldn’t remember what I said to you at the hospital?” Donna and Cam have been talking about how the girls are doing, and Donna’s question seems to come out of nowhere.

Cam can’t say anything for a moment. “I just . . . didn’t really want to talk about it, not then, anyway.” Cameron is pretty sure that she doesn’t want to talk about it now, either, but she can’t see an easy way out of it this time around.

Donna just looks at her. “Cam . . . I didn’t mean it, even then. I just . . . I’m really sorry I said it.”

Cameron can see just how bad Donna feels, and she wonders about it. Why this, after all that they’ve done to each other and everything that might need dredging up? Their hospital encounter should be barely a blip on their radar. But still, at the time it had shaken Cam more than she would have thought possible.

Cam realizes that she has to say something. “You had every right to say what you said. You didn’t know about Bos, and I never should have written that algorithm.You were too smart not to figure it out. I knew you would, sooner or later.” Cam wonders as she says this why she just hadn’t cared about that part. Why had she risked what she had with Joe? Had she _wanted_ Donna to figure it out? And if she had wanted that, _why_  had she? Cam gives herself a mental shake.It’s much easier not to ponder these things.

Donna is looking at her thoughtfully.“I didn’t even realize that Diane had called you.She must have done it while I was parking the car.”

Cam nods. “Diane has been pretty good about me and Bos. I don’t think she likes me much, but she’s always been supportive of that. Bos is . . . he’s just always been there for me. I can’t imagine not having him around.” Cam’s voice chokes as she flashes back to the fear that she felt as soon as she got Diane’s call that night. It reminds her of things from her past that she tries hard never to think about.

Donna glances away, and then looks back at Cam. “Do you remember the last time we met each other in a hospital?I kept thinking about that, after it all happened.”

Cameron sighs. “Of course I remember.Lev.Those guys who weren’t George. That was awful.”

“I felt like that was all my fault, for coming up with Community in the first place. It was the first time I saw anything _bad_ about what we were building at Mutiny.” Donna’s voice is low, and Cam knows exactly how she feels.She had felt it too, that night: the dark side of what had always seemed to be a perfect, safe world of trust, creativity, and exploration.

“But it wasn’t your fault—it just _was_.Lev had great experiences on Community after that one terrible one.” Cam smiles a little at those memories. Lev had shrugged off the beating a lot more easily than the rest of them had.

Donna nods, still clearly not convinced. “I wish we’d had some way of protecting him from that. And I also wish . . . ” Donna’s voice trails off without finishing the thought.

“Donna, Bos wasn’t your fault, either.That just _was_ , too. And he’s fine.”

Donna glances sharply at Cam. “How do you . . .?”

“Bos told me. He figured that it was worrying you, but he couldn’t quite bring it up himself. He didn’t say so, but I think he wanted me to talk to you about it.”

Donna shakes her head. “It’s a little awkward when you scream drunkenly at an old friend, and then watch him collapse in front of your eyes. I just wish none of that had happened.”

Cam nods. “That’s sort of the mantra of my life. There’s a lot more that I wish hadn’t happened than I’m glad _did_ happen, or it seems like that anyway.”

“Yeah.” Donna takes a sip of her water absently.

 

**4\. Star Trek versus Star Wars**

_July 4, 1994: watching a Twilight Zone marathon._

 

“You’re kidding me.” Donna stares at Cam incredulously. “You actually think that Star Trek is better than Star Wars? You’re a _Trek_ person?You?”

“What do you mean, _me_?” Cameron wonders just how insulted she should be.“What’s wrong with me?”

“It’s just . . . you’re a walking action movie. You ride a motorcycle. You’re not afraid of scary guys in bars who sell us counterfeit XTs. Isn’t Star Trek a little too gooey for you?” Cam has never seen Donna looking quite as stunned as she does right at this moment.

Cam shrugs. “The tech is a lot more interesting in Star Trek than it is in Star Wars. We’re going to see real tricorders someday.They’re cool.”

Donna snorts. “Maybe, but we’ll never see any great games coming out of the Star Trek franchise. Star Wars is made for games.You’re supposed to be a game designer. Don’t you care about that at all?”

“Sure, if you want to create more first-person shooter games. That’s all Star Wars is, really—just one big western shoot-'em-up. Trek has _themes_. It actually has something to say.” Cameron can’t believe that Donna, of all people, can’t see this very basic truth.

Donna tries again. “You can’t possibly think that the Enterprise is a better ship than the Millennium Falcon. There’s just no comparison there. And light sabers are much, much cooler than phasers.”

Cam hesitates. She has to admit that she _does_ think that the Millennium Falcon is sort of awesome, and she’d been known to fantasize about light sabers in her day.Given the conversation, evasive maneuvers are probably in order. “Ships and weapons aren’t everything. They’re not even the _main_ thing.”

“So what is the _main_ thing?” Donna sounds amused now.

“Beverly Crusher!” Cam flushes; she can’t understand where that one came from.

“What?” Donna is staring at her. “Why her?”

Cam shrugs.For some reason, it crosses her mind that Dr. Crusher’s hair looks a whole lot like Donna’s. She pushes that image away. “She’s a kick-ass doctor.There’s no woman in Star Wars like her.Princess Leia sucks.”

Donna just looks at her. “Well, I’ll give you that one. But there’s no villain in Trek like Darth Vader. I mean, that cloak!”

Cam is feeling less unbalanced now. “Sure, but the villains in Star Trek are a lot smarter and a lot more interesting. There’s Khan, and Q, and the Borg . . .”

“The Borg are smart?” Donna looks as though she can’t believe what she’s hearing.

“Ok, maybe _they_ aren’t smart.But they have . . . symbolic resonance.” Cam feels a little foolish as she says this.

Donna laughs out loud at that. “Symbolic resonance? Who _are_ you?”

Cam grins back at her. “This might be the only thing that we’re never going to be able to get past.”

Donna gives her a quick glance, and Cam realizes the significance of what she has just said. Their first joke about . . . all of it. And it feels good.

Donna turns her attention back to TV. “Hey, look.‘Eye of the Beholder’ is about to start. That’s one of my favorite _Zone_ episodes ever.”

 “Mine too,” Cam leans back, ridiculously happy for no real reason at all. “I’m glad we agree on _something_.”

 

**5\. Divorces**

_July 17, 1994: visiting Gordon's grave_

 

“What exactly happened with you and Gordon? I mean, which one of you wanted the divorce?” Cam breaks the comfortable silence between them abruptly.

Donna is quiet for a second. It’s not that she doesn’t want to discuss this with Cam, but talking about Gordon is difficult for her. “It had been coming for awhile, before you even knew us, actually. But you remember what it was like. You saw a lot of it.”

“But was there something specific?I mean, what made you decide not to keep going on the way you’d been doing for all those years?” Donna can see that this is important to Cam for some reason, although she’s not exactly sure why. But she doesn’t know how honest about it she’s willing to be, or how far she wants to go with this one. Things with Cam still feel too new and delicate.

“You mean, did one of us have an affair? No, it was nothing like that. It . . . started to get really bad after . . . after Mutiny went public. Well, it probably started before that, when . . . when we . . .” Donna can’t finish the sentence, but she sees the flash of pain on Cam’s face, and she knows that she has been understood.

“I didn’t know that. Gordon never talked to me about any of it.” Cam is studying her hands, as if they contain a great secret.She doesn’t look at Donna.

Donna sighs. “I don’t think Gordon ever forgave me for . . . for what I did. I think he thought that he just didn’t know me anymore. Or that what he knew, he didn’t like or respect.” She is quiet, thinking about that time. Not only had she sold out Cam and lost her, she’d also ruined Mutiny and apparently dealt the final death blow to her relationship with Gordon. She had the girls, and she had a new career as a VC associate, and that was it.

Cam shakes her head a little. “Tom couldn’t forgive me either. I’m not sure I even wanted him to.”

Donna looks at her. “Forgive you for . . .”

“I slept with Joe. At Comdex, at the Comdex where you told me about your World Wide Web idea. Actually, I slept with him right after I saw you at that Atari party.” Cam has an odd expression on her face, somewhere in the hinterland between laughter and tears.

Donna wants to ask her why she slept with Joe that night, but she’s not sure she’s ready to hear the answer. She settles instead on, “When did you tell Tom about it?”

“After I got back from our browser meetings. I figured he had a right to know.” Cam flushes suddenly and stops meeting Donna’s eyes.

“Cameron . . . “ Donna can’t go on, can’t think about how it felt when Cam told her that she couldn’t work with her on the browser project, that she was the sort of person who tossed people aside when they were in her way. She doesn’t think she’ll ever be able to tell Cam how that moment had defined who she was, and how she thought of herself, for the next three years.

“Donna, I’m really sorry.I should never have done that. You were trying, and I knew it wasn’t true.It was just . . . cruel, what I did.” Cam’s voice is shaking, and Donna suddenly realizes how much that moment had been weighing her down, too.

“Cam, you’re the least cruel person I’ve ever met." It's out of Donna's mouth almost before her brain even formulates it, and she sees the surprise in Cam's face. Yet Donna knows it to be the absolute truth. Cameron might be impulsive and thoughtless sometimes, she might shut out other people, she might be stubborn, but even at their lowest point, no matter how hard she tried, Donna could never manage to doubt the hugeness of Cameron's heart. "I hurt you, and you wanted to hurt me back," she continues. "That’s human. It’s just not the best part of being human.” Donna touches Cam’s shoulder as she says this; it’s as much contact as she allows herself, and it's far less than she wants in the moment.

Cam shakes her head. “And it was all for nothing. I mean, I bailed on the browser project right away, and I never really worked on it the way Gordon and Joe wanted me to. I might have been the reason we lost out to Mosaic.”

“Well, maybe not. Millennium lost out to Mosaic too, and we were working on it all the time. Sometimes things just happen the way they happen.” Donna hesitates, and then asks what she’s thinking about. “Why _did_ you bail on it?”

Cam stares at Gordon's gravestone, at the flowers that Donna had placed on top of it. “After I told Tom about sleeping with Joe, I wanted to make it up to him somehow. We agreed that I’d only work on the browser project remotely, but every time I talked to Joe on the phone, I felt guilty. It was easier _not_ to talk to him, and soon it was easier not to have any contact at all. And it didn’t work, anyway. Tom met someone and left me, and that was that.”

“I’m sorry.” Donna knows it’s a meaningless thing to say, but she says it nonetheless. _He wasn’t good enough for you, anyway_ flits through her mind.

“Yeah. Me, too. Well, sort of, anyway. They just had a baby, so it worked out better for him. He really wanted a family.” Cam looks at Donna a little ruefully, and Donna knows that she’s thinking about Joe, about what the future holds for the two of them. Since she has nothing useful to say about that, she touches Cam’s shoulder again and remains quiet.

 

**0\. The Meeting**

 

Sometimes, in the middle of talking about something else entirely, Donna notices a shadow cross Cam’s face, and she is suddenly transported back to _You mean the kind of person who actually tries to make things work instead of fighting with every person who threatens her savior complex?_ and _Why don’t we see if your marriage lasts a year before you start doling out relationship advice?_ And sometimes, without warning, Cam sees Donna looking at an old photo of Gordon and hears _Says the woman who will take any excuse not to go home to her husband;_ sometimes she watches Donna’s deftness at juggling her life and _I’m sick of this. Go, take a hard look at this company and ask yourself who made it what it is and who’s just been along for the ride_ echoes inside her head. Both of them instinctively know that they will never speak of that meeting to one another, that there is nothing that can ever be said. It is their oozing sore, the one thing that will never really heal or go away.

Yet secretly, both of them are oddly grateful for that sore. They have managed to contain it as a walled-off infection, rendering it harmless, trapped, boxed, unable to poison the living, breathing organism that they are recreating with one another, an infection that is both enemy and friend, because it has made them stronger. They now know, as they had not known before, what they have, what it is that needs to be valued and protected. The past is the past, the future is a flickering place of uncertainty and hope, but they both know that they finally have now, and that now is more than enough.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you like this Yuletide treat, RidiculousMavis. I enjoyed the one you wrote for Yuletide last year, and I wanted to return the favor. We need more Donna/Cameron fic on AO3!


End file.
